The Real Adventure
at all would. Only a man, perfectly infatuated, grinning ... See if you
can't tell what she looked like and how she said it."
Jimmy, meek again, attempted the task.
"Well," he said, "she didn't look me in the eye and register deep
meanings or anything like that. I don't know where she looked. As far as
the inflection of her voice went, it was just as casual as if she'd been
telling me what she'd had for lunch. But the quality of her voice
just--richened up a bit, as if the words tasted good to her. And she
smiled just barely as if she knew I'd be staggered and didn't care a
damn. There you are! Now interpret unto me this dream, oh, Joseph."
Violet's eyes were shining. "Why, it's as plain!" she said. "Can't you
see that she's just waiting for him; that she'll come like a shot the
minute he says the word? And there he is, eating his heart out for her,
and in his rage charging poor John perfectly terrific prices for his
legal services, when all he's got to do is to say 'please,' in order to
be happy."
There was a little silence after that. Then:
"Don't you suppose," she went on, "there's something we can do?"
A supreme contentment always made John Williamson silent. He'd been
beaming at Jimmy all through the dinner, guarding him tenderly against
interruptions, with pantomimic instructions to the servants. If the
vague look in Jimmy's eyes suggested the want of a cigarette, John
nodded one up for him. He didn't ask a question. Evidently, between
Jimmy and Violet, the story was being elicited to his satisfaction. But
it was amazing how quickly that last words of his wife's snatched him
out of that beatific abstraction.
"No, there is not," he said.
The tone of his voice was a good deal more familiar to his fellow
directors in some of his enterprises, than it was to his wife. She
looked at him as if she couldn't quite believe she'd understood.
"There is not what?" she asked.
"There is not a thing that we can do or are going to do about Rose and
Rodney. We did something once before and made a mess of it. This time
we're going to let them alone. They're both of age and of sound mind,
and they've got each other's addresses. If they want to get together
again, they will."
* * * * *
"I've had a perfectly bang-up evening," said Jimmy to Violet a little
later when he took his leave.
"I know you have," she said dryly. Then, with a change of manner, "But I
have, too, Jimmy. You believe that, don't you?"
"Sure I do," he said, and shook hands with her all over again. Violet
was a good sort.
Riding home in the elevated train, Jimmy Wallace hummed what he
conceived to be a tune. And when he did that ...!
CHAPTER II
A BROKEN PARALLEL
None of the speculative explanations Rodney's friends advanced for his
having bought that precious solemn house of the McCreas, together with
all its rarified esthetic furniture, exactly covered the ground. He
didn't buy it in the expectation that Rose was coming back to live in
it, and still less with the even remote notion of finding a successor to
her. He hadn't bought it because it was a bargain. He had very little
idea whether it was a bargain or not. And if there was a grain of truth
in John Williamson's explanation, Rodney was only vaguely aware of it.
He'd have said, if he'd set about formulating an explanation, that he
bought the house as a result of eliminating the alternatives to buying
it. Florence meant to sell it to somebody, and if he didn't buy it, he'd
have to move out. Rather disingenuously, he represented to himself that
his dislike of moving out sprang from the trouble that would be involved
in finding some other place to live in, furnishing it, reorganizing his
establishment. Really, he hadn't time for that. Frederica would have
done it for him in a minute, but he ignored that possibility.
Down underneath these shallow practical considerations, lay the fact
that such a reorganization would have been a tacit acknowledgment of
defeat; not only an acknowledgment to the world, which he'd have liked
to pretend didn't matter much, but an acknowledgment of defeat to
himself. What he had been trying to do ever since his return from that
maddening talk with Rose in Dubuque, had been just to sit tight; to go
on living a day at a time; to take the future in as small doses as he
could manage.
Had he been the sort of person who finds comfort in mottoes, he'd have
laid in a stock, such as, "Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof";
"Holdfast is the only dog"; "Don't cross your bridges until you come to
them." As the period between the night of his discovery of Rose on the
Globe stage and the day of his return from Dubuque receded, and as the
fierceness of the pain of it died away again (because such pains do die
away. They can't keep screwed up into an ecstasy of torment forever) the
part he'd played in the events of it, seemed to him less and less worthy
of the sort of man he'd always considered himself to be; a
self-controlled, self-disciplined adult. He'd acted for a while there,
with the savage egotism of a distracted boy; thrown his dignity to the
winds; made a holy show of himself. Well, that period was over at all
events. Whatever the future might confront him with, he could promise
himself, he thought, to keep his head.
But for a while, he didn't want to be confronted with anything, let
alone to start anything; not until he could get his breath; not until he
had time to think everything out; discover, if possible, where the whole
miserable trouble had begun. He'd go back to the beginning, sometime,
and try to work it all out. It went, probably, a long way back of the
night when that hasty speech of his about not jeopardizing the
children's lives to gratify his wife's whims had set the match to her
resolution to leave him and the babies and live a life for herself.
But, though he told himself every day that he must begin ordering his
old memories, analyzing them, in search of the clue, he didn't begin the
process. Spiritually, he just held himself rigidly still. He might have
compared himself to a man standing off a pack of wolves, knowing that
his slightest move would precipitate a rush upon him. Or, perhaps more
nearly, to a man just recovering consciousness after an accident, afraid
to stir lest the smallest movement might reveal more serious injuries
than he suspected.
His mind had never worked so brilliantly as it was working now. The
problems involved in his clients' affairs were child's play to him. He
took them apart and put them together again with a careless, confident,
infallible perspicacity that amazed his colleagues and his opponents.
And, as Frank Crawford had pointed out, he took a savagely contemptuous
pleasure in making those clients pay through the nose.
But he could look neither back at Rose, nor forward to her. He could
not, by any stretch of resolution, have nerved himself to the point of
giving up that house that had nearly all his memories of her associated
with it. There hadn't been a change of a single piece of furniture in it
since she went away. Her bedroom and her dressing-room were just as she
had left them. Her clothes were just as they had been left after the
packing of that small trunk. She might have been off spending a week-end
somewhere.
The attitude couldn't be kept up forever, he knew. Some time or other
he'd have to cross the next bridge; come to some more definite
understanding with Rose than that inconclusive ridiculous scene there in
Dubuque had left him with. (_What_ a fool he had been that day!) There
were the twins coming along. For the present, their nurse (It wasn't
Mrs. Ruston. He'd taken the first reasonable excuse for supplanting
her.) and the pretty little snub-nosed nurse-maid Rose had liked, could
supply their wants well enough. But the time wasn't so far ahead when
they'd need a mother. What would he do then; let Rose have them half the
time and keep them half the time himself? He'd read a perfectly beastly
book once,--he couldn't remember the title of it--about a child who had
been brought up that way. But, at all events, he needn't do anything
yet.
Meanwhile, it healed his lacerated pride to march along and keep the
routine going. It was with a perfectly immense relief that he snatched
at the chance to buy the McCrea house, and by so doing make the
permanency of his way of life a little more secure. He could keep what
he had, anyway. And he could show the world, and Rose, that he wasn't
the broken frantic creature he knew she'd seen, and suspected it had
glimpsed. John Williamson's explanation wasn't altogether wrong.
Perhaps, had it been possible for Jimmy Wallace to tell him, just as he
told Violet and John Williamson, how Rose's voice "richened up as if
the words tasted good to her," when she mentioned the fact that she
heard from her husband "regularly but not much," he might have drawn the
same favorable augury from it that Violet did. But from her answering
communications, though he drew comfort, he got no hope.
It was Rose herself who began this correspondence, within a month of her
arrival in New York. And Rodney, when he finished reading her letter,
tore it to pieces and flung it into the fire, in a transport of
disappointment and anger. The sight of her writing on the envelope had
brought his heart into his mouth, of course. And when his shaking
fingers had got it open and he saw that it indeed contained a letter
from her, beginning "Dear Rodney," and signed "Rose," the wild surge of
hope that swept over him actually turned him giddy, so that it was two
or three minutes before he could read it.
But the thing ran like another instalment of the talk they had had in
Dubuque. She knew he had been distressed over the shabbiness of her
surroundings, knocking about with that road company, and she was afraid
that in spite of the assurance she had then given him, he was still
worried about her. She was sure he'd be glad to know that she'd quit the
stage for good, as an active performer on it, at least; that she was
earning an excellent salary, fifty dollars a week, doing a highly
congenial kind of work that had good prospects of advancement in it. She
had a very comfortable little apartment (she gave him the address of it)
and was living in a way that--she had written "even Harriet," but
scratched this out--Frederica, for example, would consider entirely
respectable. So he needn't feel another moment's anxiety about her.
She'd have written sooner, but had wanted to get fully settled in her
new job and be sure she was going to be able to keep it, in order that
she might have something definitely reassuring to tell him. And she
hoped he and the babies were well.
It was not until hours afterward, when the letter was an
indistinguishable fluff of white ash in the fireplace, that it occurred
to him that it had no satirical intent whatever and that the purpose of
it had been, quite simply, what it had pretended to be; namely, to
reassure him and put an end to his anxieties.
As he had read it in the revulsion from that literally sickening hope of
his, it had seemed about the most mordant piece of irony that had ever
been launched against him. The assumption of it had seemed to be that he
was the most pitiable snob in the world; that all he'd cared for had
been that she'd disgraced him by going on the stage. He'd be glad to
know that she was once more "respectable."
Well--this was the question which, as I said, he did not ask himself
until hours later--wasn't she justified in believing that? Certainly
that night, in her little room on North Clark Street, he'd given her
reason enough for thinking so. But later, in Dubuque--well, hadn't he
quoted Harriet to her? Hadn't he offered to help her as a favor to